One answer to "What's the academic equivalent of HN?" is "going to week-long conferences and workshops", which often involves a bunch of presentations of papers

One answer to "What's the academic equivalent of HN?" is "going to week-long conferences and workshops", which often involves a bunch of presentations of papers (with Q&A) and discussions long into the night. Before the pandemic, an academic (such as me) could easily spend the entire summer just going from one conference to another. With the pandemic, there's now a lot of live video chat, and seminar series where everybody gets together in Zoom, there's a talk, and discussion afterwards. Here's an example of such a series for number theory: https://sites.google.com/view/vantageseminar https://sites.google.com/view/vantageseminar And, here's a massive list of mathematics (and related) online seminars: https://researchseminars.org/ https://researchseminars.org/ In math there's also a lot more "think deeply and send an email" that happens, rather than things like Hacker News.